When I began to breathe!

Some years back, I completely lost some thing that greatly helped me transform into some one, which later inspired me to start another blog: happiest man on earth.

I lost my will to convince others of my opinion. I stopped going into discussions. I stopped asking questions that were intended to bring the other person to my desired conclusion. I stopped engaging into meaning less talks on politics, sports and movies. I would only want to hear what the other person had to say about a particular event, cause, niche or a social issue.

When I stopped all that mental hassle, I began to see people as they were. Not what I would have tagged them with before my internal transformation, nor what they appeared to be. I began to see people as some thing they could have become.

It wasn’t that I had nothing to say. In fact, with this stopping myself of convincing others, what I had to say grew manifold inside of me. Things began to form links. Events became meaningful. Every new day a certain understanding began to grow.

It was truly hard in the beginning. We are not used to this. We are used to certain neurological responses and behaviors.

We have been raised that way. One such response is immediate comparison and judgment. Our mind takes the following steps, perhaps in a friction of a second.

1. Whenever we hear an opinion about an issue, our mind begins to search whether we have some thing to say about it or not. If its a yes, then second step begins.

2. The next step our mind takes is to compare our existing opinion with what we hear.

3. The next step is to decide whether the “new” opinion goes with our existing one or it goes against it.

4. Since our brain virtually hates creating new neural path ways,  it chooses the comfort zone, here in this case: sticking to an existing opinion.

5. Doing the contrary involves very hard and difficult steps. What if the other person is right? Then we would have to mold or reform or re-design our opinion  ( all mental hard work for brain circuitry cells again).  What if accepting that the other person is right leads us to face another situation, which is more grave for us? Most of  people simply do not discuss religion because of this fear that they might be proven wrong and then they would have to accept the truth.

Keeping in mind the hard work in step 5, our brain chooses to stick to existing neural path way associated to already established thought patterns.

The next behaviour is to tell two people that we are right. The first one: our own self. The second person is the one whom we are speaking to.

We want to tell others we are right  because our ego has linked being right with a sudden greatness. We think because of our belief systems that to be great, some one has to be always right.

We want to tell ourselves that we are right because then we won’t have to do hard work or re-designing mental patterns and thoughts.

We begin to defend or convince our opinions.

I lost it all. I disallowed my ego of the luxury of wanting to be always right to apparently look great. It involved a lot of mental hard work. Hours of thinking. Tens of hours of mind game practices, but it all was worth it.

Today I have lost it all. I do not want any one to get convinced of my view. I do not even want some one to follow the path I am on. I have now understood that every one is not meant for the difficult walks.

With that losing of will to convince others, I became free. I got rid of comparing myself with others. I did not compare my ideas with others. I read and read and tried to learn, but it was not because of wanting myself to compare, but it was because of pure curiosity.

I lost all unwanted stress. I began appreciating people truly and from my heart. I became highly comfortable with my own self.

I  began to breathe !